Tennessee disenfranchises 21% of its Black residents, a far higher proportion than any other state.
Scott says she paid off her court costs years ago. But when she brought a voting rights restoration form to the county clerk to affirm that she had paid, the clerk told her she still had an outstanding balance of $2,390.
She is now a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the Tennessee NAACP challenging the state’s voting rights restoration process. In court documents, the state denied allegations that the restoration process is inaccessible. Republican Cameron Sexton, speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, said people convicted of felonies should have to pay court costs and child support before voting.ProPublica
A 2019 report from the Tennessee Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that the requirements for repayment have been. The report also noted that Tennessee has increasingly levied court charges “as a means for funding the State’s courts and criminal justice system.” The civil rights laws of the 1960s opened up voting again for Tennesseans. But soon lawmakers began adding back in provisions that disenfranchised people convicted of felonies. Legislators updated the statute every few years, adding to the list of crimes that permanently disqualify someone from voting. The result is a convoluted list ofThe reality of disenfranchisement in Tennessee received some national attention recently around the case of a.
“We said we wanted to do criminal justice reform, but all we’ve done is really nibbled around the edges,” state Sen. Brenda Gilmore toldDawn Harrington, the founder of Free Hearts, an organization that supports formerly incarcerated women, also advocated for the 2021 bill.
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